


the normal heart: or, five things ianto jones never knew he wanted

by subduction



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-05
Updated: 2008-05-05
Packaged: 2017-10-06 00:54:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/47927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subduction/pseuds/subduction





	the normal heart: or, five things ianto jones never knew he wanted

1.

 

The floor under Jack's desk is pristine.

 

The floor is pristine because Ianto sweeps it once a day and mops it every other. Ianto can tell the floor is pristine because his face is very near it. Blood is rushing to his head: amplifying the throb of his heartbeat, making him even dizzier than he would already be. Ianto's face is near the floor, and Ianto's boss has him bent across his lap with his skirt up, and every so often there is an excruciating _crack_ as he brings the ruler down hard across Ianto's bare ass.

 

After a while Jack stops. Ianto starts to turn his head, questions half-formed on his lips, but Jack's hand catches the side of his face and turns him back to the floor. Jack's chair swivels, and Ianto can hear the scraping sound of furniture being dragged across the floor; that would be the other chair. At length Jack lifts his head up, gentle, gentle — tugs the chair closer, and then Ianto's head is cushioned on a pillow which smells faintly of lavender and is covered in soft green velvet.

 

Jack's thumb rubs over his cheekbone. Tenderness, at a time like this: Ianto can endure a lot, but this is testing his limits.

 

"Comfortable?"

 

Under ordinary circumstances he'd have a snappy reply to that, but right now Ianto can only manage a moan. His mouth is open, slack; starting to leave a sloppy wet mark on the cushion. Jack takes this for an affirmative, and gives him another, harder than ever.

 

The part that hurts, actually, is not the strike of the wooden ruler, but the following skim of Jack's hand over the burning mark it leaves. His fingertips are gentle but determined, and Ianto takes it well, but sometimes a nail will catch on the tender red skin, wrench a ragged gasp from his throat. Jack shushes him gently, then, bends to kiss the nape of his neck. Murmurs obscenities in his ear to make him jerk hard against Jack's lap. Laughs softly and goes back to his work.

 

After a while he switches: sets the ruler down, spanks him with his open hand instead. His hands are broad, thick, strong. Ianto has watched them often enough. Forceful when he talks with them. Steady when he fires a gun. Heavy and hard now, as he smacks one across Ianto's exposed skin. The force is more distributed, though: _pressure equals force per unit area_, says Ianto's mathematical mind as the first blow lands, desperate cognitive disconnect — and so it's more of a hot tingling than a sharp scorching burn.

 

It still hurts like hell.

 

"Good?" Jack asks, and Ianto is faintly surprised to hear the rasping note in his voice that says Jack is turned on, enjoying this — enjoying him, like this. He shouldn't be surprised; this is for Jack, really, as much as it's for him. Everything is. Him needing Jack, in and of itself, is for Jack's sake; and so he shouldn't be surprised.

 

Also, Jack is hard as a rock under Ianto's thigh, and has been for quite some time.

 

"Yes," he manages to get out, although it's spoken into the pillow and sounds more like "Yrmph" as a result. He turns his head to the side, catches Jack's eyes for the first time.

 

"Yes," he says again, more firmly, though he has to grit his teeth to form the words. "Good."

 

"Brave boy," says Jack.

 

 

 

2.

 

The other thing about this, of course, is that for Ianto's skirt to be up _Ianto has to be wearing a skirt_. This part is at least as arousing and twice as frightening as the part where he's being spanked like a misbehaving schoolboy.

 

How this part happened is a little easier to make sense of, though. Not much, but at least they'd talked about it. Sort of.

 

Jack had been teasing him.

 

"You don't have to do that," he'd said, coming in after the mission to find Ianto dusting and straightening his desk. He was dusty, loose-boned in the doorway: tired.

 

"I don't mind," Ianto had said, or "it's my job," or "not a problem, sir." His phrases, like his ties, are interchangeable.

 

"You're not the maid, Ianto. I know we take advantage a bit—" gesturing to the crumbs scattered over Owen's workstation, the empty coffee mugs by Gwen's, the stack of greasy pizza boxes on the table "—but you don't have to clean up after us all the time, and you _don't_—" taking the stapler from Ianto's hand, firmly "—have to clean up in here."

 

Jack was stressed. He was good at hiding it from the others, but to Ianto it might as well have been written on his face. It was in the edge to his voice, certainly. Ianto didn't know why; he usually didn't. Jack's moods were a simple enough matter, but the reasons for them were a mystery — like Jack's birthday, or his irrational dislike of Marmite.

 

"It's late, anyway," Jack added, as the line between their eyes began to turn into an uncomfortably tense creature of its own. "You should really go home."

 

Just the faintest emphasis on _really_. God, but he was tense about something. Ianto bit back the urge to offer him solace — tea, Ovaltine, a blowjob.

 

Instead he said "Good night, sir," hating himself for the note that crept into his voice. Jack would hear it. Jack was pretty good at reading him, too. That was a mistake; so was the way he lingered, almost against his will. Just a moment too long, and then he started for the door. And sure enough—

 

"I mean," and Jack's voice was carefully casual now, which should have been a big red flashing warning sign in and of itself — "that's unless you _want_ to be the maid."

 

Ianto wasn't exactly sure what to say to that, but he paused in the doorway, half-turned.

 

Jack was smiling: hands behind his head, legs crossed, feet on the desk — but it still wasn't quite right. Something dangerous about the quality of the smile. The tension hadn't gone out of Jack's voice, and despite himself Ianto was starting to have an idea of where this was heading.

 

(As for why Jack had had the uniform in the first place, well. Ianto had been working for him long enough to know that there were certain things about Jack which it was better, for the sake of one's own sanity, not to contemplate.

 

It was black, of course; fitted, with puffed sleeves and a lace collar and a frilly white apron and a saucy little cap. Ianto's practiced eye told him it was well-tailored. Expensive. Jack put it on him, standing behind and reaching around to button up the front. Drew him close to smooth the apron over Ianto's thighs, pulling his ass back against the hard front of Jack's trousers. Used his hips, and his hands on Ianto's, to turn them around for a better view.

 

Jack's walk-in closet was all mirrors, the vain bastard, so Ianto could see himself; could see the pair of them, like a caricature of a finer time. Jack the stern patriarch, the military man, in his high-waisted flannel trousers and red braces; Ianto his dutiful maid, ready to scrub and sweep and suffer outrageous debauchery at the hands of lord and master.

 

"Don't you look sweet," Jack murmured in his ear, and bit at the lobe.

 

"I'm not as sweet as I look, sir," Ianto retorted, turning his head to catch that full lower lip between his teeth. He could just about match Jack for coquettishness when necessary. He could do an awful lot of things when necessary.

 

(Jack had held up a tube of shiny, slut-red lip gloss, but Ianto had shaken his head. "Maybe next time," Jack had said with a wink, and the image of his cherry-painted lips tight around Jack's cock had leapt unbidden to Ianto's mind.)

 

He'd fucked Ianto in the uniform before they could even get out of the walk-in: hastily and from behind, half-bending him over a dresser. One hand bunched the skirt up to the small of his back while the other went to Ianto's mouth. Two fingers in, rough over his wet lips, quickly coated. They were exactly the same height, so that it had taken a little work to get him inside, and for one desperate moment Ianto thought it wouldn't work at all; but then Jack bent his knees a little and pushed Ianto to lean harder on his elbows — and then he was in, in and in and breathing hot and shallow against the back of Ianto's neck.

 

In the mirror Ianto had gasped, throat working hard, and come all over Jack's hand and the dresser and the glass.)

 

 

 

3.

 

Jack has discovered — they both have, because Ianto never knew it before, either — that Ianto likes it when Jack talks dirty. In his more self-analytical moments (Ianto spends a lot of time alone with his Issues, these days) he supposes it's all tied up with his usual cocktail: guilt and fear and self-loathing, with a dash of burning shame.

 

Guilt is easy enough: guilt over last week, when he'd missed calling his mother on her birthday, busy wrangling Weevils. Guilt over Torchwood One. Guilt over the woman he loves, who is rusting in the basement while he plays naughty secretary with his boss. Shame, too — over what he lets Jack do to him. What he _wants_ Jack to do to him. (This probably explains the spanking, too.)

 

Ianto is still spread over Jack's lap, legs half in the air, and Jack is telling him exactly what he does as he does it.

 

"Want me to blow you?" he asks, conversationally.

 

"Nnrgh," Ianto agrees.

 

"I should find us someone else to play with," Jack muses. "One of these days. We'll go out and pick up some pretty young thing. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

 

Ianto makes a sound low in his throat, a sort of glottal hum.

 

"Or maybe," Jack murmurs, leaning down to bring his mouth close to Ianto's ear, "maybe I could just keep fucking you with my fingers until you come all over—"

 

"Oh," Ianto says, low and desolate, "_oh_," and he knows, without looking, that Jack is smiling.

 

 

 

4.

 

Jack has been gone for five weeks when Ianto decides to try it on his own.

 

(He'd thought about Owen first, simply because it would be less work; he was right there, after all, and Ianto was pretty sure he'd be up for it once the idea presented.

 

That thought had lasted all of three minutes. The thought that he, Ianto, was also just there, and less work, and likely to be up for it — that one lasted somewhat longer.)

 

The first time, it doesn't go so well. He picks the wrong club, maybe, or the wrong night — a Tuesday; the weekday-weekend distinction has lost most of its meaning by now (alien invaders don't tend to stay home knitting on bank holidays, either, and it isn't like Torchwood pays overtime) — or maybe just the wrong trousers. The wrong mood. Maybe it simply isn't time yet.

 

The second time, Ianto does his research, and tries to ignore the fact that it isn't like him for there to have to _be_ a second time. He's getting sloppy, and he knows it. But the second time he does his research, and goes to the right club on the right night. He pays £6 for lager which tastes like piss and swigs casually from the bottle as he circles the floor. Loosens his tie a little. Undoes the top button of his shirt.

 

Later, in his flat, he will chase the ashen taste of spunk and lager from his tongue with crisp, obliging Finnish vodka. He is not a serious drinker, not even now, but on some nights oblivion feels called for — or simply the only thing for which he can muster much enthusiasm.

 

But that is later. Now, he needs to find a cock. He puts it to himself that way, slightly hysterical: he is surveying the room for a cock. It will, he supposes, have to come attached to a body which possesses a face which hides a mind, but none of that is the object here.

 

When he goes to his knees it is on tile which might have once been white, and the whole time he is intensely, embarrassingly conscious of the ruin of his charcoal gabardine slacks. His suit jacket hangs on the hook behind him and brushes his shoulders. He takes out his plain cufflinks, one at a time; he rolls his sleeves up to the elbows. _Getting down to business_, he thinks. That thread of the hysterical is bound up, somehow, with other, sweeter, more bitter memories: other things, other nights which would seem as improbably surreal as Ianto Jones, lavatory cocksucker, if only he did not know them to be as factual as his very bones.

 

The cock he has selected is thick and heavy, wet and livid with heat where he rubs it against his cheek. He takes it hungrily and does not look up.

 

 

5.

 

It's hard to name the things which have changed. Or the thing. Jack hasn't, he doesn't think, so it must be Ianto.

 

It's Saturday night, and one of those rare occasions when a weekend for the world coincides with downtime for Torchwood Three. Ianto has his feet up on Jack's desk — when did he start to do that? — and is tapping at the surface with the eraser end of a pencil while he tries to think of a seven-letter word for 'suffering'.

 

"Hi," Jack says from the doorway, in the casual voice which, with Jack, means anything but casual.

 

"Seven letters," Ianto says, not taking his eyes from the puzzle. "Suffering."

 

"Distress?"

 

"Starts with 'P'." He puts the paper down on the desk for a moment, fills in 12-Across: 'obsequious'. Picks the paper up again. Jack rocks back on his heels, but doesn't move from the doorway.

 

"Want to fuck?"

 

Ianto glances at him over the top of the crossword, shrugs it and looks back down. Jack gives a long-suffering sigh, but it's the kind he gives when he's wrong and knows it.

 

"Dinner and a movie, then?"

 

Ianto glances over the paper again. He screws up his mouth a little, pretends to think. "And then we fuck?"

 

Jack grins, and as he reaches across to grab his coat Ianto catches hold of his sleeve and pulls him into a brief, hard kiss.

 

"Seven letters," Jack says. "Suffering, you said?"

 

Ianto nods. "Starts with P."

 

"Passion," says Jack.

 

"Yeah," says Ianto, after a moment. "Good. Yeah."

 

He pencils it in, and hits the lights on the way out.

>   
> _What mad Nijinsky wrote_
> 
> _About Diaghilev_
> 
> _Is true of the normal heart;_
> 
> _For the error bred in the bone_
> 
> _Of each woman and each man_
> 
> _Craves what it cannot have,_
> 
> _Not universal love_
> 
> _But to be loved alone._
> 
>  
> 
> W. H. Auden
> 
> —from "September 1, 1939"


End file.
